Doe
by haihappen
Summary: (Original short story using Wildbow's Pact setting) He is running. From what, he does not know. Updated several times, since I am a non-native English speaker/writer, a few factual errors crept in. Hopefully completely corrected by now.


He ran.

Why, he did not know.

He ran in the middle of the night, the dirt road beneath him only visible by starlight.

Why, he did not know.

His lungs screamed, his heart pounded, sweet running cold all over his body.

That was the running, so much he knew.

The landscape around him was bleak. The grass seemed to be pale, trees were without leafs. Gnarled and twisted they seamed to hug the road where the were standing close enough. Seeming to grab for him.

He didn't even want to know. Averting his gaze to only look forward, the direction he ran.

His presumably black leather jacked hung in tatters from him, wailing in his own airflow. Puddles and patches of wet dirt caked his ripped jeans in mud. It layered over the patches of dark black.

Blood.

The realization his him hard, he stumbled and nearly fell full stride in the dirt. But his legs managed to keep his footing, conscious choice was not involved. Looking down on himself for the fraction of a second, he registered his ripped shirt, revealing skin and more than a dozen cuts. If they were bleeding he could not fathom, nor seemed his mind be willing to spare the thought on it.

The horizon, a dark shape in stark sharp contrast against the starlit night sky. It seemed to break away left and right. Leaving cracks where stars were visible for a second, then the darkness started to bleed into the sky, blackening out the stars one by one.

Another stumble, another near fall.

His legs started to fail, his body strained to its capacity and beyond.

He tried to carry himself onward, fighting against his weakness.

Why, he did not really know. But it had to be something important. He searched his mind for a reason, and a simple thing came forward.

Fear.

His energies were not renewed, no surge in power. But he had no intention of stopping. He fell into a lopsided jog, like a rag-doll pupped, jerked by its strings.

A roadblock up ahead. not blocking the street behind it, but facing the direction he ran towards. Its construction was simple: A heavy wooden bar on two metal poles with a big sign hanging from it, and several concrete crash barrier blocks directly beneath it.

In the sea of adrenalin, a simple thought arranged: Evade. Walk around it.

But his legs were past all control.

He slammed into the heavy barricade, coming to a sudden stop. All breath was knocked out from his lungs, and he slumped over the nearest concrete block.

The sound of his own, overtaxed heart drummed in his ears, accompanied by his rasping, desperate breaths. His eyes were still open, he did not dare to close them. His own breath fogged his vision.

Rising his arms and catching the concrete, he tried to push himself to his feet.

Pain flooded him. It was not new pain. It had been there all along, just ignored in favor of adrenalin. But it got back into the spotlight. He groaned. The sound was strange in his ears, there was no echo, not the slightest.

But at least he was on his feet, or at least leaning on the concrete block in a semi-upright position. Setting one foot in front of the other, without feeling his his feet or legs, made for a very wobbly and nearly comical appearance.

Having rounded the roadblock after what felt like an eternity, he looked at the sky. A single star was there, the rest was pitch black darkness.

The ground around him seemed to be cracked, like roots of nothingness digging into reality, like a mirror fractured in its frame and slowly falling apart. The world came to pieces around him.

Why, he did not know.

A bright light blinded him.

Trying raising his hand to shade his eyes, he became aware that he needed both his hands to keep standing, by falling to the ground.

Half sitting and kneeling on the ground, the person holding a flashlight stepped closer. Averting his eyes, the green and red dots flickered in front of his vision, but they faded. When he felt that his eyes had adapted enough to the strong illumination, he dared to raise his head again and look.

A woman looked down on him. Holding her flashlight by the hip, she had directed its beam to the ground so they both were illuminated by it.

An older woman, her face was deeply wrinkled with a hard-set frown. Eyes colder than the air around them. Her hair was dark gray below a brown leather hat, tied into a ponytail. Heavy weather jacked and boots, tool poach and hunting knife in a holster on her hips. By her appearance, she would easily be mistaken for a ranger or wilderness guide.  
But she had something else. She commanded an aura of respect.

"What is your name?" Her voice cut the pointed silence like a rusty saw. He hadn't noticed the quiet until she had broken it.

Coughing, he tried to speak:  
"I am ..."  
His voice broke. He reached for his name and found it gone.

"Who are you?"

"I am ..." nothing.  
An unknown quality of panic started to rise in him.

"Who is your mother?"

Irritated, he looked at her. Her face sported anger, and something else. He could not comprehend just know.

"Her name? What is your mothers name? Answer!"  
A flat, but demanding tone. She put a sense authority behind it.

"She is ... Her name is ..."  
His mind drew blanks. His tongue tied up.

Her next questions were but a whisper:  
"Where do you come from? Why are you here?"  
But they pierced into him nonetheless.

Silence flooded the surroundings and his mind.

Where did he come from? Why was he here?

He started to turn his head into the direction he came from.

Her hand has fast, and her grip was like iron on his jaw. She jerked his head back to face her, bringing his eyes directly in front of hers.

"When you look back, you will be undone. You are nearly nothing, it would be enough to unravel your existence."  
Her voice was a snarl, repressed anger seeping into it.

"I know what did this to you. I know what it took. Your past, your identity. And your future is fading as your remaining ties with this world slowly erode away under the pressure."  
His gaze didn't leave her eyes. Something was boiling behind the cold stare.

"It works like that, it feeds that way."

Among the words that washed over him and commandeered his attention, a sliver of a thought stole the fraction of second to form:  
Rage. Thats behind the eyes. A living, boiling pot of anger. But against whom. She had the means of destroying him, here and now, by whatever means, and she would be right to do so. But she didn't.

She released his jaw, and steadied him at his shoulder instead. He could feel the ground around him cracking and breaking. Coldness, stronger and stranger than the cool nightly air. Demanding, gripping.

"Apart from It, limbo is reaching out to you. Reality cannot hold you much longer. The question is: Should I help you?"

She let the question hang there.

Should she? Why?

He was a shadow of a person, he became aware. Self consciousness is something terrible to achieve, only to register that your self was s hollowed out shell.

"I ..." he stammered, fishing for words in a mind that seemed so distant, so alien.

"Thats enough."

Without averting here gaze, he put down her flashlight facing him, it made his eyes water but he did not dare to break eye contact.

From a jacket pocket, she retrieved some small items. With a barely audible click, the small led flashlight send its narrow but bright beam flying. She laid it down, sending a beam parallel to them into the night. Four similar flashlight followed, she heavily leaned to the sides to place them. They formed a small pentagon of light.

She picked up her original flashlight again. The first time since she jerked his head around, she broke eye contact. His head slumped down, his neck muscles following suit with the dead tiredness of his body. With one hand still steadying him, she searched his body with light.

"Tattered. Frayed. Messy. Outright dirty. Mud? No. You look like a bird that flew in a storm. Bird? No. Caught in the headlight like a deer. Deer? Stag? No, too fickle. Running away is no stags business."  
She was not talking to him, but about him. A conversation with the universe, or herself.  
"Black hair, black jacket, black shoes. Not counting the rings under his eyes, that is not him."

She started to hum. A small, simple, almost happy tune. It was surreal. But reality was not something he was entitled to right now, according to her words.

The world outside the pentagon had gone dark. No stars, not trees, not dirt ground. Only darkness and shadows of deeper darkness, milling around. He heard whispering, snarls, the grating of wood, teeth and bone.

"Lost lamb. Black lamp. Little dirty one young one. A step from becoming a feast of crows."  
She lifted his head by his chin with the back of her hand. The off-skew flashlight illuminated her face from a weird angle, deepening the folds in her face to ravines, giving her the face from a nightmare. A nightmarish face, sporting a juvenile smirk.

"It is so easy. It is sitting there in plain sight!"  
The noises in his head dies away instantly, producing utter and complete silence, the deeper shadows stopped to move. But he could feel their eyes resting on him, as if posing to strike.

"Your old name is gone, You shall have a new one. One that fits. Your past is gone, making you a stranger everywhere, an unknown. A lost little deer escaped to be made a meal. The darkness that is to witness the birth of your future, more than a color."

She gripped him on both shoulders.

"I hereby name you. Rise to your second chance at life, John Doe Black."  
As she rose, she dragged him with her.

My fractured mind got pulled together. Not truly mended, I could feel the jagged edges to things that where missing, but the wounds were knotted, ready to heal with time. and leave scars.

I had a self again.

As if a a set of loose strings lying in a heap pulled tight all at once,  
I felt every limb in my body jerked straight.

As I stood there, held upright by the forces of the universe which I now was tied to again,  
I let my head fall backwards and looked in the sky.

The stars were brighter than I ever imagined, their light showered me. Even closing my eyes, for the first time in what felt like my entire live, I could feels the starlight washing over me, seeping into me. My feet found their own stability and I looked down on myself. My Arms , and my chest where the shirt was ripped, I could see the skin was covered with receding dark hairline cracks. The cuts were still there, and for the first time, I was connected enough to my body to feel the throbbing.

I looked at my savior, and without thinking, I opened my eyes again, and for the first time, I saw the world how it truly is, and more.

Her aura of respect. A monument, carved statues of numerous people, all bowing their head. Not only people, but also the nature around it. The trees knew her, the animals knew her, and they all respected or feared her.

Her flashlight, a natural extension to her body. Symbols, interwoven with her jacked and boots, glowing with energy. A small matchbox in her jacket pocket, something inside moved.

Her eyes. Pity. Curiosity. Anger. The boiling pot of anger, he could see where it was connected to. I did not want to look into that direction.

"You see." She said.

"I see."

She let out a sigh.  
"I have to teach you some things."


End file.
